Drake to host Alumni Writers Festival

Share this:

The Drake University Writers and Critics Series will host the Alumni Writers Festival at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 11, in the Cowles Library Reading Room, 2725 University Ave.

The festival will feature three Drake alumni who will read from their recent published fiction and poetry, and discuss how Drake prepared them for pursuing their current work in creative writing. They also will field questions on topics such as getting published and the ins and outs of graduate studies in creative writing. Jennifer Perrine, assistant professor of English, will moderate the discussion.

The alumni writers are:

Shanley Jacobs, a 2005 graduate, studied English literature at both Drake and Oxford University. She teaches writing, rhetoric and creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she is pursuing her MFA in poetry.

Adam Peterson, a 2003 graduate, has been featured in or has work forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, Handsome and others. A story he co-wrote won the 2006 Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award at The Mid-American Review.

Aaron Plasek, a 2003 graduate, edited The Dimebag of Poetry and curated the Et cet*er*a reading series before earning an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has taught at the Art Institute, St. Augustine College and Benedictine University. Plasek is writing two novels and a collection of poems.

Drake’s English Department and Center for the Humanities sponsor the series. All events in the Writers and Critics Series are free and open to the public. For more information about the series, contact Jennifer Perrine at 515-271-4161 or jennifer.perrine@drake.edu.